Winter of Discontent

Thorrington for a year, they had been careened, suspect timbers replaced and recaulked with a mixture of moss soaked in tar hammered into the joints between the overlapping two inch thick planks that formed the strakes of the clinker-built hull. Both were typical snekke, with a length of about sixty feet and beam of about 9 feet. Being Danish ships they had a very shallow draught of less than 2 feet when unladen. If a man could stand with his knees covered in water, the ship would float. Norwegian ships were built with a slightly deeper draught, coming from a land of deep fiords rather than shallow sand flats.

The oars, ten a side with two rowers per oar, had been checked and several replaced. The oiled leather rowlocks for the oars had all been replaced. The masts, some thirty feet high and carrying a sail nearly forty feet wide, had been checked and new woolen sails made. The shields had been removed from the ship sides as these were only used on land. Alan had also installed a ballista in the bows of each ship.

Bjorn, the captain of the Zeelandt, now on the northern run from Narvik to Oostend, had arranged for two experienced Norwegian longship captains to join Alan’s service, Sven Knutson and Lars Erikson. Both were nephews of Bjorn, who had attested to their ability and claimed, “They can use their ‘sun stones’ and sail anywhere, and each have led nearly as many raids as I have.” Each ship had its Norwegian captain, five English sailors to handle the steering oar and the sails, forty rowers, who doubled as swordsmen, and ten trained longbowmen. There were also five men to crew the ballistae. The ships were the Havorn, the ‘Sea Eagle’, and the Alekrage, the ‘Cormorant’. The crews had been training together for close on a month and were starting to have the instinctive understanding and action needed in any situation.

When not in use the ships were hidden under a long row of weeping-willow trees on the bank of Alresford Creek, which acted as a living camouflage net.

Alan was again very angry with Edsel, the King’s Reeve at Brightlingsea, who had once again refused to participate in the communal defence activity despite the very important strategic location of the village on the north shore of the approaches to Colchester. The men of Brightlingsea had been noticeable by their absence at the victory two years before at Wivenhoe. Alan had made it clear that this time, if they did not support his efforts, they would stand alone if the Danes attacked their village. Indeed, he was so angry as to almost be prepared to burn the village himself.

Two days later Alan stood near the steering oar of Havorn as the ship was rowed quickly down Alresford Creek, followed closely by Alekrage. The captain was Sven Knutson, who was acting as helmsman. The Norwegian, short and stocky for a Viking but possessing the usual long blond hair and beard and piercing blue eyes, was standing balanced on widely-spread feet. Alan allowed his gaze to rest on Alekrage, admiring the simple beauty of her lines and the precision with which the ten oars a side dipped and rose as one. Lars Erikson, Alekrage’s captain and a huge bear of a man, was clearly visible at the stern of his ship as he barked out instructions. Sven was a taciturn man, not given to idle chatter and his shouted instructions were as brief as possible. Lars took a different approach to managing his crew- volubly chastising any infraction.

Looking forward along the length of Havorn Alan was surprised at how crowded the ship was. Forty men were pulling steadily on the oars. They faced towards the rear of the ship, the two rows of oarsmen occupying two-thirds of the width of the ship and leaving a narrow aisle down the centre. The small ballista, unique to Alan’s ships and specially built by him, occupied most of the small space in the bow. Ten archers found what space they could, mainly sitting in the aisle with wet bottoms from the inch or so of water that had either seeped in through the caulking or was left over from the last shower of rain.

The men all wore leather scale-armour at the insistence of Sven, who set an example. Danes and Norwegians usually wore chain-mail byrnies, although not always when at sea. Given Sven’s brief comment that not many men could swim in rough open seas wearing forty pounds or so of steel, most of the men had opted for armour made of boiled leather, which weighed about one-third of that. Along the saxboards, the sides of the ships, were tied the oarsmen’s personal weapons. These were cross-bows for use at distance, boarding pikes and both long and short swords. The archers kept their longbows with them, unstrung, along with sheaves of arrows. Two barrels of spare arrows sat before and abaft the mast. The yard and the woollen sail were currently lowered.

Alan marvelled at the military force packed into such a small hull, barely twenty paces long by three wide, and the way that the light, swift and manoeuvrable ships could project power at long distances and at great speed. King William was a man who had fought all his battles on land against foes who travelled on foot or horseback. His lack of understanding of the importance of a strong naval force to protect coastal trade and repel raiders was something that irked Alan. He wished that he could have more than two ships. He could afford to buy them, but the manning requirements of fifty or more men per ship made such a plan impossible. The men he did have were fyrdmen, fishermen and farmers from the sea-side villages, who usually spent one day a week in training. Alan had doubled that at the moment to two days and the current day’s training was to take advantage of the strong southerly winds that had the sea forming a short chop with waves up to six feet high and a short swell.

As soon as they left the shelter of Alresford Creek the boat began to pitch up and down as the men rowed into the wind. The motion disturbed the rhythm of the rowing, with oarsmen ‘catching crabs’ and having their oars skim across the surface in the troughs and bite too deeply on the crests. Sven became animated for the first time that Alan had seen him, shouting curses and directions at the oarsmen, telling them to watch each wave and adjust the depth of their stroke while maintaining rhythm. Alan went amidships and stood next to the mast, wrapping one arm around it to maintain his balance.

Once the ship was a mile offshore Sven turned west, putting the longship side-on to the wind and waves. The motion increased dramatically as the ship rolled and plunged like a berserk horse. Sven’s shouted imprecations grew even hotter and more personal, with many references to mothers and their marital status. The sailing crew were instructed to raise and lower the sail several times, oarsmen assisting with pulling on the ropes that controlled the mast and yard. The mast itself was raised and lowered repeatedly, the kerling and the mast-fish being man-handled into and out of place with the activity disturbing the adjacent rowers. The ship’s motion had made a number of men ill. Some had been able to find a place at the side, while others were forced to vomit where they sat. Alan had difficulty in controlling his own stomach as the ship rose and fell and rolled side to side.

With the mast lowered and the oarsmen at work Sven then ordered an empty barrel thrown over the side. The archers stood and tried to maintain their footing as the ship plunged and rolled and the bowmen tried to shoot at a moving target from a moving shooting position. Next the oarsmen were given the opportunity to use their cross-bows before Sven ordered the ballista crew into action. They were ordered only to use plain iron bolts without Alan’s secret incendiary mixture called ‘Wildfire’, similar to Greek Fire, as the motion of the ship made it likely that the mixture would be dropped and their own ship burned instead of the target. The ballista crew were surprisingly accurate out to three hundred yards. While the target barrel was hit only once, at least a third of the shots would have hit a ship sixty feet long. The flat trajectory and the velocity of the bolt meant that when the target was in the sights a quick release of the bolt would see it usually strike home before the target had moved or disappeared into a wave trough, and that unlike arrows the wind hardly affected the aim. The archers were then given another opportunity for nearly an hour, before Sven ordered the oars on one side of the ship stilled for a few moments and pointed the ship towards home. He could have sailed most of the way back, but insisted on the men rowing as part of the objective of the training cruise was to have the oarsmen fit and able to row all day.

When they returned to the head of Alresford Creek, some half mile from Thorrington, the tide was half out, exposing a large mudflat that the men had to struggle through, up to their knees in thick black mud, to reach the shore. Sven had left four men on board with instructions to properly moor the ship when the tide returned. As he and Alan squelched their way home he commented, “Not bad. They’re improving and will give the Danes a run for their money. They’re farmers most of the year as well, not like us Norwegians. We had difficult conditions today and they didn’t do too badly. In good conditions the longbowmen and the ballista will be a real surprise for the Danes. Your men may not be as good as Vikings, but they are as good as the Danes!”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN